


And Now, We Look Russia in the Eye

by mazzyg



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: F/M, Gen, History is Complicated, Light Angst, Undecided Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-14
Updated: 2016-07-14
Packaged: 2018-07-24 01:42:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7488426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mazzyg/pseuds/mazzyg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Times change, and Belarus pretends she doesn't have time for Lithuania's regrets. She knows better than most there's more to both of them than meets the eye.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Now, We Look Russia in the Eye

Gedinimas Tower stood at her back as Belarus rested her gloved hands atop the low stone wall that surrounded the place. From here, she could easily look over the entire stretch of the city of Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, with a cold and careful stare that matched the slate gray of the sky. The streets twisted in new patterns, and the buildings looked all wrong for they were stone instead of wood, but in her mind she could still see the old city where she had spent much of her childhood spreading out in waves from this hill. There had been the grain stores, and there had been the defensive walls, and there had been the road which she’d traveled in order to live within the wooden fortress that housed the family of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania’s reigning King so long ago.

Up here, only the hiss of the wind and the creak of trees kept her company. It tugged at the long, pale strands of her hair and left cold kisses on her cheek, but she only irritably brushed it aside. Compared to the cold winters of her home, Lithuanian winters always felt ridiculously warm, and her heavy wool jacket kept her from any chill. 

She heard footsteps, distantly, and assumed them to be other tourists, if rather enthusiastic ones. She liked early morning because no one ever went walking around without very serious business, and in these times, Gedinimas Tower stood only as a remnant of historical curiosity. A museum for old men and women now dead, and all they had hoped to claim, and the large Empire they had once built. A historic heart, barely alive.

“Belarus?” 

She turned abruptly, the wind pulling long hairs across her face, as Lithuania spoke her name. The narrow-shouldered man looked concerned, his brows drawn together and the wind dragging his long dark hair into a mess about his head. He wore heavy mitts and a coat of dark green, but underneath she could spy a suit and good leather shoes. There were meetings to be had that day, but they were far from starting.

“Hello, Lithuania,” she greeted him cordially, if even toned, in Belarusian, a stiffening in her back the only acknowledgement for how he had startled her. “I was merely out to have some fresh air before we were to be stuffed into the meetings.”

Lithuania smiled that stupid, placating smile and looked up at the Lithuanian flag, snapping yellow-green-red in the wind, atop the tower with fondness. He lifted a hand in acknowledgement of the silly thing before making as if to stand beside her.

Her shoulders stiffened and she focused on the nearby gleam of the Vilnia River to the east, running swiftly from where it split from its parent river to the north. Boats once had clogged the rivers with trade, but here, and now, the water ran empty and dark with a city’s pollution. 

Lithuania understood the necessity of silence, and kept it, as they stood a few feet apart against the stone wall in front of her. She ignored him. He did his best to subtly watch her, in the way he had learned from his time in Russia’s house, in order to try to gauge her intentions. He thought no one noticed, but she noticed. She’d been watching him ever since he’d been this huge beast to her as young girl, that she sometimes admired, and all the way until the time he had become just another ‘member’ of Russia’s ever growing family as she had become a young lady. 

“Do you ever,” Lithuania finally ventured in her own language, leaning his elbows on the wall and thus bending in nearly half, “Miss the Grand Duchy?”

It was an unusually daring question, and Belarus stared at him a moment before knowing quite what to answer. 

“Why would I miss being ruled by anyone?” she asked, curiosity peaked as she narrowed her eyes at him.

Lithuania’s expression broke down into a soft smile and an equally soft laugh, quickly torn apart by the cold air. “I know. I mean. … Belarusian was the language of Lithuania’s governing for a long time. Everything was about you among the nobility. I loved you.”

Belarus’s voice caught in her throat, and her fingers clenched tight together in front of her chest as if to defend it from a blow.

“Did you know,” Lithuania kept saying, turning his face into the stinging breeze and thus reddening with eyes holding a very long stare, “That for the longest time everyone still spoke it—Belarusian? We were supposed to just take you in, Gediminas wanted to make Lithuania something amazing. You and everyone else. We just became this beautiful mess of things for a while, pagans and Christians and everything in-between, before everything started to fall apart.”

“That’s not so,” Belarus said, finding her voice at last even if it felt cracking and dry. “Together, you and Poland ruled everything.”

“But we lost you,” Lithuania said, his expression saddening in that way that was nearly impossible to notice. It was something by his eyes, a sweet sadness she hated for she found it horribly false. “And Ukraine. Everyone, eventually. It's not that I couldn’t understand Russia wanting a family, you know, but it was never the same after then, and you can’t remake what you had.”

Belarus forced her hands down from her chest, her boot-heels sounding very clear as she took two steps towards him. “……I liked the horses,” she said softly. “And Gediminas’s long moustaches. I thought they were funny, when I was a very little girl. I hated being away from home, from Brother, but here was better than anywhere else. I still had Sister. Better than the Golden Horde. Better than Moscovy. I did not understand it well, at the time.”

“You were such a tiny thing,” Lithuania agreed, his far-eyed gazes still stuck on the distant rivers that cut the land into a corner, here, where the tallest hill in all of Vilnias stood.

“And you were so large.” She did not know what to make of the odd jumble of feelings in her chest, so she focused on taking two handfuls of her blue skirts, although she forgot what she meant to do with it the moment she did. She just looked at the hem and the lace there very intently, as if she could ignore the sadness in the air.

“And now, we’re both sovereign Nations, members of the UN, and can look Russia in the eye.”

Her mouth curled into a dry smile, and she missed the moment Lithuania straightened up from his lean against the wall in order to take her hand. She stared at her gloves as they were gently tugged from her skirts by large green mittens, looking sharply into Lithuania’s face with stiff shoulders. The other man still had that horrible, lying face that tried to say everything was alright even if his eyes were sad. She hated lying, and she hated the way Lithuania’s face always lied, and missed keenly when she had been a girl and Lithuania had always been honestly laughing when he’d picked her up in his arms.

“Yes,” she replied as primly as she could dredge up, staring him back in the eye very directly. Her hands were curled into unwelcoming cages of bone in his grip. “Did you need something from me?”

Lithuania’s expression faltered, but the other man was too good at hiding things and lying to allow this for more than a moment. He smiled instead, soft and sweet, and dropped her hands gently. “I think it’s about time for the meetings to start. We should go.”

His Belarusian was still very good, she thought oddly in that moment, as her hands felt cold. She turned from him toward the broad gravel path that lead back down into the city from the crest of the hill where they stood, tucking her hands under her arms. 

She did not start walking, nor did she answer, and she could sense Lithuania trying to adjust to this behind her. 

“Yes,” she finally stated, and began to walk. “We should.”

**Author's Note:**

> A friend gave me the prompt to write something about two characters who rarely cross paths in the manga, but that doesn't mean they don't have a complicated background.
> 
> During the 14th Century, Gedinimas became the Duke of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and expanded their lands in a push that would make Lithuania one of the largest states in European history. Among the areas taken over by the Duchy were Belarus and Ukraine, during a time when the Mongol’s Golden Horde had invaded much of southern Kieven Rus’, and the Princes of Moscow (the ancestor state of Russia) were beginning to gain power in the North. 
> 
> Only later, after a lot of trying to keep the Teutonic knights from trying to destroy them, would Lithuania and Poland become the Commonwealth in an attempt to cool old arguments between a lot of sons who all wanted to rule the same place.
> 
> The administration of the Grand Duchy was mostly conducted in Old Belarusian, and was spoken there by members of the Lithuanian Nobility as late as the 1800s.
> 
> Gedinimas’s Tower stands as one of the remaining pieces of what is thought to have been the old Royal Palace of Lithuania, believed to have been a wooden structure, and the original center of the city of Vilnius. In 1988, when Lithuania finally achieved sovereign status, the Lithuanian Flag was first flown atop this tower and has been there ever since.
> 
> I like to imagine he always quietly loved her, but nothing would ever, ever come of it.


End file.
